Category Archives: customer experience

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You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was to find out if the any of the three sushi restaurants within walking distance of my hotel were actually open.

Their websites were full of text, explaining the ambiance, the chef’s background, even the history of the restaurant (and in one case the historic building that it was located in). The pictures of neatly arranged and presented sushi rolls and specialties looked pretty and further whetted my appetite.

But they still didn’t answer my question, nor did they help me navigate the website to provide the answer to my question — is this restaurant currently open?

FAQs Don’t Make Up for a Poor Site

I eventually found the information I wanted in the Frequently Asked Questions page.

Which got me thinking: If you still have an FAQ page then it means you implicitly acknowledge that you are presenting your customers with a digital experience full of answers and information that no one wants. You are ignoring the one question that will help you optimize your customer journey.

Why do your customers come to your website, or use your mobile app, in the first place? What are they trying to achieve?

I would think for a restaurant the three main reasons that people engage online are to find out location, opening hours and menu options.

So Many Pages, So Little Useful Information

I once worked on a project for a large company whose website was a perfect reflection of its corporate and business unit structure. It had a lot of FAQ pages — each business unit had its own.

Even the employees had a hard time figuring out where to find information.

But analysis showed that 80 percent of the traffic went to the website to look up product specifications, pricing, to buy spare parts or get support. Once we rebuilt the website around making those tasks as easy as possible, traffic, leads and online parts sales revenue increased.

Structure your digital experience around supplying the critical information your customer needs in the easiest way possible, then start to optimize the details through testing.

Your Goal: A Frictionless Digital Experience

Use testing to develop a frictionless experience. Test if the text and graphics you are using help drive the experience. It doesn’t matter if picture A gets more hits than picture B if neither help drive the experience. Look at click-through rates and subsequent customer actions.

If you are using graphics to drive the experience, check to make sure that the graphics are composed and positioned to help the customer on their journey. For instance, shots which guide people’s eyes in the direction of the next call to action generate far more click-throughs than thoughtfully posed shots of smiling models looking straight out of the page.

Test to make sure that the page layouts, paths and text and graphics are market and culturally appropriate. Does the experience change based on the level of the customer engagement and where they are in their journey? Do you have your customer journey mapped out and know which parts of the digital experience map to which steps in that journey?

Remember optimizing through testing is not about A versus B — it’s about removing the friction from the experience. I don’t care if the Dragon Roll looks prettier than the California Roll if I can’t find out when you’re open for business.

It took a man with his sleeves rolled up to make me understand that we had a problem.

A Flawed Hero

At the time I has heading the marketing content delivery group at a major equipment manufacturer and we’d just posted a new ‘hero’ shot on our website. We were very proud of the image: a burly rugged looking guy on a job site stood in front of one our machines. A perfect illustration of our brand.

Or so we thought, until I logged in to my email the following morning to find my inbox stuffed with requests to take the image down.

Most of those emails came from one specific geographical market. What we hadn’t realized was that the burly man had his shirt sleeves rolled up, and in one of our biggest, most important, markets that was a safety violation. And safety violations were definitely not something we wanted to be seen promoting, or have associated with our brand.

The image was quickly taken down and metadata added that it wasn’t to be used in certain markets. On reflection, we should have already done this. But like many large companies we drew our content from all across the enterprise, as well as from outside suppliers and agencies.

Customers Don’t Care About Your Silos

The man in the shirt sleeves got us thinking: Did different parts of the company use different images to represent the same things based on their local and business knowledge? Did they assume an implied level of knowledge about the subject and its applicability? Did the images chosen just reflect the siloed make-up of the business’s organizational structure? How was metadata applied — if at all — to ensure correct usage and attribution?

Most importantly: how did all this affect the customer’s experience when interacting with our brand across different channels around the globe?

It doesn’t matter how your company is organized, or what separate lines of business you have. As far as your customer is concerned every interaction with you is a representation of your brand, and they expect a consistent experience. But it must also be a consistent experience that is relevant to them and their locale.

Pull Things Together With a Visual Content Strategy

So how do you deliver a consistent brand representation while still being aware of localization and cultural issues?

You need to develop a Visual Content Strategy:

What do you want your images to do? — Showcase your products? Showcase your customers? Show customers using your products?

What business need do you want your images to help achieve? — Engage prospects and lead to click-through and lead capture? Educate and help customers with self-service thereby reducing support costs?

What sort of images will you use to reflect your brand? — Photographic and realistic, inspirational and abstract?

Where will the images be used? — Global generic images? Regional and local application? If regional, how localized?

Next, look at the images that you are already delivering or have in development. Do they match the aims and business drivers outlined in your visual content strategy? If not, stop using them.

Content for the sake of content, no matter how pretty it looks, is a waste of resources and opportunity.

Take a detailed look at how your products are represented and localized. After the “shirt sleeves” incident one of the decisions we made was that for the equipment product pages on our website the main product shot would be just the machine against a plain white background.

Presenting the equipment in a consistent way made it stand out and avoided localization issues. The job-site shots were relegated to a gallery that could be customized based on the customer’s location.

The next step is developing a strong metadata model that is applied to the images to ensure that you use the same images to show the same ideas and concepts. Attach data that fits your workflow and that allows you to deliver the sort of customer experience that reinforces your brand. Balancing consistency with creativity should also be considered and trade-offs need to be made.

Delivering Consistent Experiences

With a strategy and metadata architecture in place you need a way to store and manage images so that they can be easily located and used in the correct manner.

A Digital Asset Management system is key to delivering a consistent visual user experience. I’d recommend starting with an achievable object, such as a DAM to drive your website and then grow it organically across the enterprise, to cover other delivery channels. Get people used to using it, prove that it provides value and it will lead to improved customer experience.

The man in the short sleeves helped my team develop and deliver a platform that quickly grew to an enterprise solution with over one million assets that could be tracked and reused to send the correct message in the correct market.

It all started with a drip of water. You know that moment when you open the fridge door and feel a drop of water on your hand where you shouldn’t. It didn’t take me long to track where it was coming from, a dislodged pipe.

At least that’s what I thought it was. I managed to reconnect the pipe, but although the trickle of water lessened, it didn’t stop. Whatever was wrong was deeper in the workings of the fridge than I could see or reach.

No problem, the fridge was still under the manufacturer’s warranty. So I headed over to the manufacturer’s website and opened the online form to book a service call. It was all going well until I got to the line that asked for the fridge’s serial number.

It was back to the kitchen where I opened every door, and peered at every surface of the fridge writing down any number I could find; but it turned out none of them was the actual serial number. The serial number that was a required field on the service call form.

I called the customer help desk number, and the lady explained they needed the serial number so they could make sure they had the right information about model number for spare parts, and to check the purchase date and warranty coverage. That all seemed fair enough.

“So where do I find the serial number?” I asked.
“On a sticker on the fridge.”
“And where’s that sticker located on the fridge?”
“Oh, it’s on the back.”
“On the back of the fridge. The back that’s against a wall and enveloped in custom built kitchen cabinets? “
“Yes.”

This experience brought back memories of when I was working in the manufacturing sector. One of the companies I worked for also used the product serial number as the prime data point to identify a piece of equipment when customers needed service or spares.

An analysis of our online service portal showed that 70% of customers got the serial number wrong. They either guessed, or in most cases input the product’s model designation instead (the nice combination of letters and numbers painted on the side in a big bold color and large font).

The actual serial number they needed was on a small metal plate under a cover – but it told you how to find it in the owner’s manual, so there shouldn’t be a problem. Right?

Both are great examples of the disconnect that often happens when companies focus on the digital customer interaction without considering the actual physical product as part the overall experience.

Customer experience is a holistic exercise, and companies need to make it easy to transfer the process, and the data associated with it, from the physical to the digital, and vice-versa.

Think about your car. Need to access the VIN number for any reason, service, DMV registration, insurance etc. it’s right there at the bottom of the windshield where you can easily access it. Need to know the correct pressures to inflate your tires to – just open the car door and look at the stickers on the sill by the door catch.

The motor industry has done an excellent job over the years in standardizing how to provide essential information to the owner/operator in an accessible manner. It’s a lesson that many makers of many other products need to learn

As the internet of things comes to life around us, the boundary between digital and physical is fast disappearing and the customer experience needs to be an essential part of that evolution.

All I wanted to do was give a business some money. Yet they seemed determined to make it as difficult as possible for me to pay my bill. We had received our first invoice from them as a paper bill in the mail (How 20th Century!), but as we pay all but two of our regular bills online we decided to go on-line and pay that way.

Two steps into the website process it asked for our Account Number; which was not printed anywhere on the paper bill, nor on the covering letter. A few clicks and we

managed to find our account profile online. Still nothing labelled as “Account Number” anywhere. OK we’ll pay by check this time around just to make sure it

gets there. Then we saw the following note on the payment instructions: “Please include your account number on the check.”

–

You mean the “Account Number” that you haven’t told us?

A few more clicks around the website and we eventually found an email address to send a question about how we found this elusive number. The response was “ Oh we get asked that a lot. You just go to your Account profile and combine the abbreviation from Box with the number from Box 5 so the account number looks something like ABC1245.”

As I ran this frustrating scenario back through my mind (after I had managed to pay the bill) it raised several Customer experience questions:

1. If you have customers repeatedly asking the same question about a part of your process, then that part of your process is broken. You need to fix it. And not in a way that makes it easier for you, but in a way that it makes it easier for the customer to complete their task, like giving you money on time!

2. If there’s a vital identifying piece of information that customers need to be able to interact with your business processes, then make sure it’s included on any, and all, customer correspondence or interaction, be they physical or digital.

3. Names are important. Thin k about what you call something. Don’t expect the customers to know the terms you use internally. Pick names that the customer will recognize and use it consistently.

As a further example of this last point, I once worked with a company where one of its product lines was known internally by its engineering name. No-one outside the company used that term to describe that sort of product. No-one in the industry, and certainly none of the company’s customers or prospects did. But the engineering name was embedded throughout the company’s processes and even used on the website.

No-one ever searched for that name and as a result it never came up in search results and on-line lead generation for that product line was almost non-existence.

After a lot of discussion we eventually got the product people to agree to using the more common name on the website – i.e. the term that customers and prospects used when searching. In a week the relevant webpages started popping up in the top 10 search results. In a year the lead generation increased exponentially with a resultant growth in product revenue.

The customers were also happier, and support costs dropped, because they could now find the information they needed quickly and easily.

Think about the names you use, and the processes you use them in – then think about them again from the customer’s perspective.

Traditionally when I’ve referred to omni-channel delivery I’ve tended to think primarily in terms of content; it’s all about making sure that we deliver the right content or messaging across multiple digital platforms such as a website, tablet, or phone. Is it a consistent experience suitably tailored for each different device? Add in physical contact points through printed media, store-front, or call center interaction and then we might be talking about delivering an omni-channel customer experience.

Does it go further than that? What do we actually mean by omni-channel?

Let’s take a look at some of the formal definitions.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines omni-channel as “denoting or relating to a type of retail that integrates the different methods of shopping available to consumers (e.g., online, in a physical store, or by phone).”

While Wikipedia broadens the scope as “a cross-channel business model that companies use to increase customer experience.” Which seems to fit in with what I’ve been discussing above.

But, let’s take a deeper look at the entomology, “omni” comes from the word omnis which can mean all or universal. If we say we are delivering an omni-channel experience are we really managing and delivering a good customer experience across EVERY channel that a customer can possibly interact with us? What about those channels outside our direct control that still add to the overall experience with our product, especially when it is sold, implemented, or supported through resellers, dealers, retail stores, third-parties, etc.

And it’s a two way process. We might be using every conceivable channel we can think of to deliver our message or communicate with our customers; but are we aware of every single channel that they are using to communicate with us? Over the years I’ve written letters to companies, phoned them up, sent emails, and these days I’m more than likely to post something on Twitter when I want to communicate both good and bad experiences. Many companies monitor these obvious channels of communication, but are they catching everything?

Which brings me back to the angry man with the van. What if one of your customers bought your product and was so unhappy with it that they painted their complaints on the side of it and used it as a mobile billboard to advertise their dissatisfaction and tell people not to buy your products? The man with the van did just that.

He made his van into part of the omni-channel by using it as a literal vehicle of communication back to the manufacturer concerned.

There is no way that we can anticipate this sort of outlier behavior, but such actions are usually a culmination of other interactions through monitored channels that have failed. Is it feasible to deliver a literal omni-channel experience? Probably not. But we can all strive to deliver the best continual connected customer experience across every channel, both outbound and inbound, that we manage.

“You can’t manage it if you don’t measure it,” has been a business cliché for decades. It’s not a sentiment everyone agrees with, as not everything worthwhile can be measured; but measurements can provide useful insights to trends and behavior patterns. So how does measurement (or lack of it) relate to the redefined customer journey I’ve been blogging about over the last few months?

So far we’ve looked at four different aspects of the customer journey: the customer perspective, company activities, departments, and the systems involved.

The final level examines the means to measure and manage the return on the investment in a continuous customer engagement strategy by linking various key performance indicator (KPI) metrics to different stages of the engagement.

Typical measurements used in the various stages of the customer journey include KPIs such as:

Net Promoter Score: NPS is calculated based on responses to a single question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale

Revenue: The income that a business has from its normal business activities, usually from the sale of goods and services to customers

Total Cost of Ownership: TCO is usually a summation of the total cost of acquisition and operating costs plus any costs related to replacement or upgrades to a product at the end of its useful life

Return Rate: Usually expressed as a percentage of the number of products sold that are returned

Call Resolution Time: Within a support group, this measures the elapsed time between a customer reporting a problem and the issue being reported as being resolved. Most support groups have target resolution times to meet, and the duration of those target may vary depending on the customer’s status

Churn: Measures the proportion of contractual customers or subscribers who leave a supplier during a given time period. It is a possible indicator of customer dissatisfaction or issues with the overall customer experience

Likes / Impressions: Usually a collection of Web and Social Media metrics such as page views, followers, and the number of posts that receive comments, likes, or are shared online. All of which contribute to an overall Brand Equity, or a measure of how the overall brand, its promise, products, and experience are perceived

This is not an exhaustive list above, you may be using other ways to measure and manage customer interactions. Yet whatever measurements are used they tend to be the indicator of success (or failure) for individual operational departments or groups, and rarely, if ever, looked at in a holistic way to provide and overall measurement of customer satisfaction. It’s possible that you could be scoring highly in specific categories, yet still deliver a poor overall customer experience due to a disconnected journey.

By looking at customer related metrics as part of an overall ecosystem rather than separate KPIs it allows you to develop a clearer picture of a customer’s overall journey and their lifecycle value.

The customer journey is being redefined in the digital age from a linear process to an ongoing loop of BUY then OWN with the companies you choose to deal with becoming more and more engaged in every part of the cycle.

As we continue to dig deeper into the journey map the fourth layer (above) connects the departmental level activity to the typical enterprise systems that record, drive, and promote the various aspects of the customer’s journey. These processes and systems have to interact. Technology bridges need to be established to allow data to flow between them to ensure a consistent experience and to maintain a relevant, valued engagement. The platforms in use must promote a sufficient degree of interoperability that allows the multiple interactions to work together.

But unfortunately the truth is that they rarely do. How many times have you transitioned from trying to do something on a website, had to call a help desk to get your goal completed and they already know your account details and what you want to accomplish? Rarely, if ever. It shouldn’t be that way.

I recently moved house and needed to change my address on various accounts. Simple I thought; just go on the various companies’ websites, open my profile, and edit the details. In most cases that worked, but in a few cases I had additional questions and needed to make a call.

With one credit card company I had a question about why my statements had stopped being delivered. The call went something like this:

Automated System: Please state your name.

Automated System: Say or input your account number.

Automated system: What’s your account safeword? (Note not the account password, but a separate “safeword” I set up when I opened the account years ago and have never needed to use since – of course I had no idea what it was).

Me: I have no idea.

The Automated System passed me on to a Call Center employee.

Call center: How can I help you?

Me: I need to change my address and I have a question about my statements.

Call center: What’s your account safeword?

Me: I have no idea.

Call center: I have to pass you on to our security team.

Wait while call is transferred.

Security team: How can I help you?

Me: I need to change my address and I have a question about my statements.

Security team: What’s your account safeword?

Me: I have no idea, that’s why I was passed to you.

Security: OK I can help you with that. What’s your name and account number? (Information I had keyed in the automated system at the start of the call and which the first call center person had).

After some back and forth we eventually got the “safeword” thing sorted out.

Security: I’ll hand you back to the customer service so they can set up your payment plan?

Me: Sorry? What payment plan? I just need to change my address and I have a question about my statements.

Security: Oh. Hang on.

Wait while call is transferred. – Get a different customer service rep.

Customer service: How can I help you?

Me: I need to change my address and I have a question about my statements.

Call center: What’s your account safeword?

Me: You have got to be kidding me!

To cut a very long story short I eventually got my address changed and asked about my statements not getting delivered. You guessed it, I got transferred yet again to a different department and went through the same run around. It turned out that when the account hit zero balance they stop sending statements. When I pointed out that it might be nice if they sent the account holder an email to let them know about that policy, or put something on the statements themselves, or even their website; I received a “oh that’s a good idea” response. An idea I doubt will get passed on as I’m sure billing and the website content are yet two more siloed operations.

Ideally silos between systems such as the ones I encountered need to be broken down, but as a minimum they should be bridged by data sets that can be easily transferred. Such data sets should reflect the information to support the customer at any given point in their journey and grow incrementally in detail as the customer progresses through their series of interactions with the company. Ideally at no point should a customer have to provide information that they have already supplied earlier in the process. It’s all about removing the friction from the process.

The processes and systems you employ shouldn’t define the customer experience, they should support it.